ripe's review...

Well, after containing my excitement until I could carry the (gigantic!) box back to my place, I snipped the packing bands and opened the box to find... another box. There also was an unmounted yamaha CD-RW drive in there beside the box. I opened the interior box and found the shiny new AW4416! Alongside the AW was an unmounted 2.5" 12GB IBM harddrive, and some mounting hardware. After opening the manual, I took yamaha's advice and mounted the CD-RW and harddrive before powering up the AW for the first time. This proved to be quite a challenge as I was currently staying at a hotel and had no tools with me... after a couple of trips to the front desk asking for various sized screwdrivers, I gave up and went to the store to get a cheapo multi-point screwdriver. I noticed from the japanese AW site that they get an included screwdriver, CD case, pen and stickers all with the AW4416 logo on them, how come we american miss out, yamaha? It sure would have helped me to have an included screwdriver at least. The installation went pretty easily after getting the right size screwdriver.

The build quality of the AW seems excellent, everything is smooth and tight, with no unfinished screwheads showing anywhere (unlike the nuts holding on some of the knobs on my 01v). The satin finish around the fader area feels really nice, but does show fingerprints quite badly. The plastic frame that mounts around the CD-RW opening seems a bit cheap and flimsy, and the screw holding it in stripped out when I put it back in with *very* little torque. It would have been nicer to see a sturdy metal or integrated cover for the CD-RW. The whole CD-RW area seemed like it was added as an afterthought, with clumsy mounting procedure, and the plastic frame. This is very minor though after you get it in place, and it *does* look nice when mounted. It also would have been nice to have a CD-RW that had a special black plastic face instead of ugly computer beige (I won't complain too loud since my *whole* akai DPS12 is ugly beige!).

After powering it on for the first time, the AW automatically recognized and formatted the harddrive, which went VERY quickly. I was expecting a 12GB drive to take quite awhile to format, but I guess I am too used to PCs and how long it takes them to format a drive. After the drive finished formatting it automatically created a new song and loaded it. I was too anxious to start with the tutorial, so the first thing I did was quickly browse over all the buttons and get a feel for how it compared to my 01v. Well, except for the general theme it is completely different than navigating an 01v. First I went to the MIDI synchronization page and set up the AW to act as MIDI clock master so I could sync my futureretro 777. No problem here. Everything went well, and I was happy to see an abundance of sync options (MIDI clock and MTC at the same time!). After getting the AW to play and sync the 777 I tried to get some audio out to my ears! This took a bit more than I expected, and to be honest I had to go to the book to find out what I was doing wrong... well, stupid me, I had plugged in the 777 to the channel 1 insert jack, so no sound was making it to the mixer! doh!

The audio quality (once I got it) was great, which I expected. After that I loaded the demo song from the included CD. This took about 10 minutes, and it was during this I noticed the noise from the CD-RW. Thankfully it spins down after the restore or backup operation, and the only noise during normal use is the sound of a small fan in the back of the unit. It is not that loud, but it is audible. The harddrive is quiet. I played back the demo song and didn't really hear the harddrive activity at all. This is a refreshing change from the clacking of the iomega jaz drive in my akai dps12. Good one yamaha. While playing the demo song and reading the tutorial, I noticed the automix feature... one word, awesome! I knew the 02R has the feature, but since I have a *lowly* 01v I didn't know how cool this was. I watched the faders and ON buttons move and blink as the demo song played back. So after listening to the demo song, I erased it. 

I opened up the operations manual next (where the good stuff is) and started recording a goofy little song I had been working on, to give it a test drive. After figuring out the 'mix layers' and the various patching arrangements I recorded my first track. One thing I did notice during this was the screen getting staticy when the machine was busy sometimes, just a little annoying. Also I noticed that a lot of the buttons caused the AW to 'change sessions' which takes a couple of seconds each time you hit a button, a little tiresome while you are trying to acquaint yourself with the buttons. I am sure this will not be a big deal once you know your way around the buttons and only hit ones that get you where you need to go. I got the track down and played it back... perfect sound! The patching to get the tracks to the recorder section is a bit tedious, with the patching needed to be set for the AUX buses to get them in to the recorder. I guess there isn't much you can do to get around this setup. One other thing I felt was the button labels didn't correspond well to the names of the screen pages they access. For example the 'setup' button accesses the patching screens, and the song button accesses the screen to load and save a song file, but to delete a song file you have to hit the file button... sort of confusing, but forgivable.

Next I gave the effects a whirl, testing the reverb first. Very nice reverbs, pretty much the same effects as the 01v, but with a bigger screen they were easier to edit. Next was auto-pan, but I was disappointed to find the time setting in Hz only (no BPM) and they are not MIDI synchronizable. Again only a small complaint, I just had to dig out the calculator. Maybe yamaha could include a calculator function in one of the utility screens in a future OS release? The distortion was pretty weak, but usable and I was anxious to check out the sample pads.

For the sample pads I decided to use a CD-R with some .wav files on it. I looked all around and couldn't find the 'edit' button for the sample pads, but then I felt stupid when I saw that it was right there next to the sample pads themselves (under the screen)! I imported the .wav files after a few tries. I was a bit annoyed by the time it took to read the CD and list the available files, and after unloading and loading the CD, the screen would automatically try and update the .wav list before you got a chance to move to a different screen. After importing a file the screen automatically jumped to the trigger list screen. I think that again, as I become acquainted with the AW this will not be an issue. The samples played back fine, but don't have the facility to loop automatically. I think the sample pad portion of the AW is a bit underdeveloped, hopefully more features will be added in the future. The trigger list sequencer can only be used for the internal sample pads, and the samples cannot be triggered by external MIDI devices, *bummer*. In fact the AW has very little support for MIDI besides MMC (midi machine control) and note on-offs for the editing the effects processor. No controller messages supported at all! I was still completely amazed by the quality and performace of the AW, so I don't want to give the wrong impression! Then I had to go to bed :)

end of part 1 - part 2 to come!